Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.The ERC's mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, based on scientific excellence.
The ERC complements other funding activities in Europe such as those of the national research funding agencies, and is a flagship component of Horizon Europe, the European Union's Research Framework Programme for 2021 to 2027.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The project required a powerful and flexible CMS to handle the ever-evolving business needs of the client, allowing for the easy creation and management of content.
Drupal´s community modules where also a key feature, as they allow for quick development and easy deployment to the production environment. This is a great asset for stakeholders, as new requirements can quickly be met, allowing for great responsiveness to new challenges.
Also, European Commission actively promotes the use of Drupal for the sites of their agencies.
Other advantages Drupal provides their users:
- Frequent security updates
- No software licensing required
Here, specially, the added security provided by Drupal’s open-source approach is a great benefit due to the sensitive nature of personal heath data.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Goals
The goal of the project was to build a flexible platform with the capability to create and share knowledge regarding the research that is being done on Europe and display funding opportunities for scientific groups.
All this while maintaining the best possible performance, with fast search and access to any content, ensuring user satisfaction.
Requirements
The objective of ERC was put into production a new version of ERC site based on Drupal 9.
They needed a new corporative page for the European Research Council in which they would be able to create and maintain different content types.
Inside the website a certain section needed to be present with a complete different style, the called Magazine.
The platform would also present some specific pages to display statistical data of the grants given, the ERC members and where the researches are being done, among others.
The site needed to be build following the guidance of the OpenEuropa initiative.
Additionally, the layout should be responsive, allowing users to seamlessly view contents in any device of their choosing.
Outcome
The end result is a fast platform built specifically for the needs of the client. A place where users get quick and easy access to information regarding grant opportunities and the status of the European research. And where they will be able to check the latest news and join the following events about European science. All of this strictly following the rules defined on the OpenEuropa initiative regarding code quality and security.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 9.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Entity ID Tools -> This module was developed specifically for this project and allowed us to maintain the Content IDs from the Drupal 7 original source.
Search API, Search API Solr -> Used to build the website’s search functionalities in accordance with the customer´s needs.
Paragraphs -> Used to allow for greater flexibility in content creation and management
Webform -> Used to create a Contact form and a Newsletter subscription service form.
Community contributions:
During the development of this project, the necessity to maintain the original content ID from the Drupal 7 source was risen by the client. For this purpose, the development team created a module that allowed us to define an initial ID for the new content created on the platform. This module was named “Entity ID Tools” and was later contributed to the Drupal Community. https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_id_tools
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Sectors:
Healthcare
